Isolerad [Corridor] (2010)

Plot:
Frank (Emil Johnsen) is a withdrawn, if not to say phobic, student who spends most of his time when he’s not in class studying. When Lotte (Ylva Gallon) moves into the apartment above his, she disrupts his routine – first by just not leaving Frank alone, then by having loud sex with her boyfriend Micke (Peter Stormare). But when it turns out that Micke abuses Lotte, Frank gets drawn more into the events than he would like.

The first half of Corridor is pretty great – tense and claustrophobic in a weirdly nice way. But then the plotting gets a little improbable and that pulled me out of the film. It didn’t completely fall apart, but it did make for a weaker second half.

The cast wasn’t bad in the film*, though I thought that Peter Stormare was pretty much wasted. He does get to do a little at the end, but in the beginning he’s basically just a shadow. And while that may sound menacing, it wasn’t actually.

So you don’t really understand why Frank is so absolutely afraid of him from the minute he sees Micke (through the window from his apartment). Which could have made for an interesting point – to make it obvious that Frank is mentally ill (or in the beginning at least really very close to it) and that his phobia comes from nothing. But while that may have been an original thought, it seems completely gone in the second half’s execution.

And that is also why the second half just didn’t work out for me as well. In the first half, I was drawn into Frank’s head and state of mind and felt the mounting tension with him (though he isn’t always the easiest character to relate to). But they completely lost me when Frank hears Micke beating on Lotte and doesn’t call the police – which he could have done without leaving the safety of his apartment or risking anything. Instead he calls them a day later and that just didn’t make sense to me (or them).

Nevertheless, it is an engaging film and I do not regret seeing it at all.

Summarising: worth seeing for the excellent first half.

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*I have to go on a tangent here: I saw this film dubbed in German because they showed no OV in Austria. Used to be that I had only problems with dubbing for movies that I understood the original language of. But I’m afraid I’ve become to snobby for even that because it really was unbearable. Never again.